A Life Less Ordinary

I'm a quote person. I love them. Inspirational ones. Funny ones. Quotes that make me think and some that make me cry and some that make me say, "Yeah! I can do it!" I have journals and journals of them. I use them on handmade greeting cards and I work them into my writings on occasion. I even bore my dogs with a spiel or two every now and then. That's right after I get done dressing them up in sunglasses and baseball hats just for a good laugh. What? "Get a life," you say? Oh, easy. Isn't that what it's all about? Finding really cool moments in the silliest of things? And then there's the fact that I need to get a life.....

"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give."
Winston Churchill

I'll always wear the year 1997 on my sleeve. We lost five family members and a good friend all within the same twelve months. We flew back and forth from Alaska twelve times and we said goodbye to people that added enormous amounts of extraordinary meaning to our lives. It was a hard year. It was a year of lessons.

I'll always go back to a small living room in Palmer, AK where my friend Christine was dying of pancreatic cancer. On the surface, it was incredibly tragic. She was 32 and had been misdiagnosed for quite some time and told that she wasn't as sick as she instinctively knew she was. She was a single mom with a twelve year old daughter and a two year old son. For all of the opportunities that there were to get hung up on the sheer sadness of it all, there were so many lessons being taught by Christine in her last days.

I sang with an accapella group from my church. Christine had an intense belief in God and she adored music. We used to show up at her house a few nights a week and just sit around her bed and sing worship music to her. She got lost in the music. I've never had someone's faith speak as strongly to me as Christine's did during this time. She would sit in the bed, wasting away daily and stretch her hands up in the air thanking God for all she'd been given while we sang at her side. It was hard to do but how can you not continue on when you're watching someone worship the way she was?

"It is not length of life, but depth of life." Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was playing piano in a local coffee shop at about 8:30p the night Christine died. Her family had been on a 24 hour care rotation for her for over a year and their small home was right around the corner from the coffee shop. I remember a friend coming in and whispering in my ear that Christine was gone and I kept playing. I waited and then walked over to their house expecting to be saddened by it all. Quite the contrary. This loving, caring family of about ten, was playing cards, swapping stories, laughing, having a beer or two and remembering Christine with the spirit in which she lived her life. Christine's sister was going to care for her children and in some way, they felt a sense of relief that Christine was now out of pain. I always felt that the people who sat by her bedside for over a year, slowly saying goodbye to her, were angels. It was like sitting guard and it was an incredible witness to someone who stayed long enough to watch it unfold.

One thing this time in my life taught me was that I want to live a life less ordinary. I'm not saying I need to climb Mt. Everest or leap tall buildings in a single bound but I want to take chances. I want to teach my children that there is nothing they can't do if they try it. I want to reach out to others who are hurting the way I was hurting so long ago. I want to sail. I want to climb. I want to fly. I want to sing. I want to believe.

"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." Anonymous

Recently we had our neighbors over for Cincinnati Chili. I used my Grandma's recipe. Several people asked for the recipe in the event that it wasn't a secret. My only response was, "Of course it's not secret. As long as I make my Grandma's chili, she's always alive." It gives me a chance to continue to let her count. Even if it is just a bowl of chili. Telling stories about my mom's parents or lost friends or influences from long ago keeps their sounds, their laughs, their words, bubbling at the surface of my tongue and thoughts and therefore they live on and I live more fully.

To live a life less ordinary....that's really my goal.